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January 4, 2017

An American Cardiologist Against Statins

I hope more doctors will learn from
this doctor and follow her. Dr. Barbara Roberts, director of the
Women’s Cardiac Center at The Miriam Hospital, is angry – and
she’s speaking out.

She does not mince her words when it
comes to the new cholesterol guidelines recently published by the
American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology –
which have suggested that millions of healthy Americans should start
taking statins.

“The new guidelines are based on
shoddy science and misinterpretation of the data,” she told
ConvergenceRI in a recent interview. “This is a gift to Big
Pharma. The American Heart Association has become little more than a
propaganda arm of Big Pharma and Big Food. It’s a disgrace.”

Expanding the number of healthy people
who take statins by the tens of millions, Roberts continued, “is
going to reap a holocaust of adverse effects.”

Holocaust? Isn’t that too strong a
word to use?

“No,” countered Roberts. “I
will stand by that. For example, we may see upward of more than a
quarter-million new cases of diabetes as a result. At a minimum,
about 10 percent of new users of statins will suffer serious muscle
side effects.” In addition, Roberts continued, “We will
see increased instances of cognitive dysfunction, nerve damage, liver
damage and an increased risk of kidney injury.”

Worse, Roberts said, “Nobody’s
life is going to be extended; nobody’s life is going to be saved
[by having healthy people taking statins].”

Roberts is not alone in debunking the
new guidelines. She pointed to a Nov. 13 op-ed in The New York Times,
written by John D. Abramson, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School,
and Dr. Rita F. Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of
California, San Francisco Medical Center and the editor of JAMA
Internal Medicine.

“Statins are effective for people
with known heart disease. But for people who have less than a 20
percent risk of getting heart disease in the next 10 years, statins
not only fail to reduce the risk of death, but also fail even to
reduce the risk of serious illness,” Abramson and Redberg
wrote. Based upon the same data the guideline writers relied on,
they continued, “140 people in this risk group would need to be
treated with statins in order to prevent a single heart attack or
stroke, without any overall reduction in death or serious illness.”

Roberts said: “We have a saying in
medicine. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to
anything.”

An alternative to statins

Roberts promotes an alternative to
statins for most of her patients – a Mediterranean diet that is
high in monounsaturated fats from olive oil and is low in red meat.
“Adhering to the plant-based Mediterranean diet will lower your
risk of heart disease just as much as any use of statins – without
any side effects,” she said.

Very few physicians, Roberts
continued, will read all 85 pages of the new guidelines. “What
people have to do is to become informed patients. They have to read
both points of view and come to a decision on their own,” she said.
But it’s very important, Roberts said, for people to know that
statins are not as innocuous as people have been led to believe.

The numbers in the studies, she
reiterated, show that you would need “to treat more than 100 people
for a number of years to prevent one event [of a heart attack].”

Further, she argued, “cholesterol is
misunderstood. It’s not the villain it’s been said to be. Every
cell has cholesterol; 25 percent of cholesterol is in your brain.
It’s absolutely crucial to the function of the brain.”

Heart disease is still the number-one
cause of death in adults, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, with more than 597,000 deaths in 2011,
according to statistics released in January 2013.

Changes in diet and lifestyle -- as
well as what Roberts’ terms “primordial” interventions are the
best ways to address chronic heart disease – rather than
prescribing statins.

“We need to stop subsidizing the
production of corn and soy, which are the ingredients in many of the
unhealthy foods that are foisted on people,” she said. “We
need to try to limit the advertising to children of unhealthy food
products such as Cocoa Puffs. We need to raise cigarette taxes even
more. And we need to stop eliminating physical education classes.”

Most doctors have swallowed the
Kool-Aid

Roberts is been an outspoken
advocate against the misuse of statins. “I’ve never turned
down a speaking engagement – from Pawtucket to Reykjavík,
Iceland.”

Many doctors, she continued, don’t
want to hear what she has to say. “They don’t want to hear it
so much,” she said.

Why?

“Because they’ve swallowed the
Kool-Aid, most of them,” she said. “I would be happy to
talk with them and give them my perspective, that the use of statins
is not supported by the medical literature.”

Further, Roberts continued, the fact
remains that “we really don’t know the truth about statins.
The reason I say that is because we know that a lot of studies that
are undertaken never get published.”

Roberts cited a recent British Medical
Journal article that showed that for all registered clinical studies,
29 percent of those trials never are published.

“It’s much more common for an
industry-sponsored study not to be published,” she said.
“Industry-sponsored clinical trials are four times more likely
to report positive results than non-industry sponsored clinical
trials. There could be a lot of studies that showed statins were not
efficacious that we don’t know about because they have never been
published.”

According to an email received AM of 01/06/17 a representative of Miriam Hospital says that Dr. Barbara Roberts is no longer associated with the hospital. No reason was given and no other details were offered.

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About Me

I am enjoying life, despite diabetes type 2. I am retired and enjoying the time I have for writing and photography. I was diagnosed with type 2 on Oct 2003, on oral meds for 4 months and they were doing nothing to really improve my daily readings. By cutting my carbohydrates I received the most improvement, but still not enough. Then I requested insulin, even though I did not like the thought of needles. That brought about the biggest change and A1c's in the lower 6's and upper 5's. Now I am working at maintaining them under 6.0 and hopefully nearer 5.5.